Harriet stares down at her lap.
“I went to college because of Jane,” she says. “Over my parents’ objections. They said it wasn’t necessary for a girl. Pah! Did my father need a college education to become the Shirtwaist King?”
Mrs. Livingston smiles at the inflections in Harriet’s voice, so reminiscent of Yetta’s accent, so clearly an imitation of Mr. and Mrs. Blanck. Harriet looks up, her eyes blazing.
“But I remembered Jane talking about girls going to college, about how they should get an education, just as much as boys. I think I remember it better because of how she disappeared, after the fire.”
Mrs. Livingston nods, accepting this. Agreeing. “There were all those laws passed because of the fire, to improve working conditions,” she says. “Yetta would have been so proud of those. And the Red Cross fire relief committee helped Rahel bring their family over after the fire, just before a pogrom destroyed their village. It’s so wrong, it shouldn’t have worked this way, but . . . Yetta’s death accomplished so many of the things that she’d wanted to accomplish with her life.”
“It’s a shame she didn’t live to see what happened,” Harriet says. “And I wish Jane had seen me graduate from college.”
Mrs. Livingston tilts her head thoughtfully.
“The fire led to a few other good things—Charles Livingston became a labor lawyer, a passionate one. He’s done so much good in his field, although I wish he wouldn’t tell his story quite so often, about how he was inspired by his experiences rescuing dozens and dozens of shirtwaist girls. . . .” Her eyes twinkle—mocking and forgiving, all at once.
“Is that who you married?” Harriet asks. “The detectives didn’t tell me, but I assumed—”
“Oh, no!” Mrs. Livingston laughs. “Me and Charles? No, no, no. My husband is Italian. He just changed his name because—”
Harriet gasps.
“So Pietro did come back for you? How romantic!”
“Not Pietro,” Mrs. Livingston says. “Although he did send a letter after the fire, asking if I was all right—and inviting me to his wedding in South Carolina.” She shrugs. “I got a much better husband than Pietro. I married Rocco.”
Harriet almost falls off her chair in surprise.
“The little boy?” she asks. “The one who kept paying you pennies for his family’s debt?”
Mrs. Livingston smiles.
“He grew up,” she says. “Rather nicely.”
Harriet still appears scandalized.
“He’s only two years younger than me,” Mrs. Livingston adds. “I just always thought of him as a little boy. Until I . . . started thinking of him differently.”
“And I guess this way he didn’t have to worry about paying you any more pennies,” Harriet muses. She looks around, her eyes taking in each detail of the spacious parlor: the new sofa, the paintings hung over the fireplace, the gleaming crystals encircling the lamps. Mrs. Livingston’s house is not extravagantly furnished, but it’s clear that she’s come a long way from being a poor shirtwaist girl who thought a single red rose was the ultimate in luxury.
“But how ... ?” Harriet begins, and hesitates, because it’s impossible to phrase her question politely.
“After the fire, the Livingston family was so helpful,” Mrs. Livingston says. “Charles’s parents were just as appalled and horrified as he was, and they wanted to do something. They asked me for advice about how to make a difference for ‘those poor people on the Lower East Side.’ And that just happened to be the same day that Rocco’s parents kicked him out because they’d found out that he was going to school instead of shining shoes and selling newspapers all day long. So I suggested that the Livingstons take him in and pay for his education. They adopted him, and now he’s a doctor.” She grins mischievously, in a way that makes her look like a teenaged shirtwaist girl again. “People are always a little confused by the name Rocco Livingston.”
“I guess this way you don’t have to worry about dealing with Signora Luciano as your mother-in-law,” Harriet muses.
“Oh, no,” Mrs. Livingston says. “The Lucianos forgave Rocco when he set Papa Luciano up with his own grocery store a few years ago. They’re so different now. We go over there every Sunday, and Mama Luciano is always nice to me, unless I suggest that my mother would have used more oregano in the pasta sauce. . . .” She knows she cannot explain to this American girl what it is like to go to the Lucianos’ each Sunday. It is a little bit like going back to Italy, except an Italy where there is always enough to eat. Some weeks, Mrs. Livingston lives for those Sunday visits. And some weeks, she can only see the people who aren’t sitting around that table, the ones who weren’t as lucky as the Livingstons and the Lucianos.
“What did you do right after the fire?” Harriet asks. “When you didn’t have your friends to live with, when you didn’t even have a job anymore . . .”
“Rahel and her husband took me in,” Mrs. Livingston says. “I was their baby nurse, their store clerk. I did what they’d wanted Yetta to do, except that because of me their children speak Yiddish and English with an Italian accent. And I began mixing in Hebrew with the Latin prayers at church.” She rolls her eyes, to let Harriet know that nobody minded this. She can make the stories of that time in her life sound so light and funny, a comical mishmash of Italian and Jewish culture. What she remembers most is crying on Rahel’s shoulder, and Rahel crying on hers. But they always ended up laughing afterward, wiping away tears and agreeing, “Yetta would think we are fools and schmendriks, crying like this.” So maybe the funny stories aren’t lies.
“Then,” Mrs. Livingston continued, “I helped Rahel take care of her parents when they got here, sick and old and baffled by America. And I went to school. It sounds like nothing to a college graduate, I know, but I did earn my eighth-grade diploma.”
“Jane and Yetta should have been here to see that, too,” Harriet says.
Mrs. Livingston nods.
“I think they know,” she says.
Harriet squints at her doubtfully.
“You act like you can know what their last moments were like,” she says. “How do you know they weren’t cursing God’s name, cursing my father’s name, screaming in misery and pain and terror the entire time?”
Her voice cracks. Mrs. Livingston can tell this is a question she’s been longing to ask ever since Mrs. Livingston finished her story.
“I can’t know,” Mrs. Livingston says. “But I feel it. I am certain. Just as certain as I am that I saw my mother in the flames and smoke. After the fire I had dreams, Yetta and Jane each coming to talk to me, to tell me not to be sad anymore. And Rahel had some of the same dreams. We were finishing each other’s sentences, describing what Yetta had said, how she apologized for never seeing the baby. And . . .”
“Yes?” Harriet says.
“Remember all those letters Jane had tried to write to her father?” Mrs. Livingston asks. “She didn’t know this, but I kept all the letters she tore up and threw away. I pulled them out of the trash. I had such respect for the written word then—it seemed like a sin not to keep each and every one. I glued them back together. When I could read them, I learned . . .” She swallowed hard. “Every one of them began with some variation of, ‘Don’t worry about me, Father, for I am alive and well and happier than I’ve ever been. . . .’”
Harriet winces.
“Those letters were all written before the fire,” she says brusquely. “How could they give you any idea what she went through that last day?”
“I put the letters in a big packet and I got Jane’s signet ring from the morgue and I took them all to her father. And ... he had had dreams too. He knew, somehow.”
Mrs. Livingston can tell that Harriet—a modern, bobbed-hair girl, a college graduate—is not convinced by dreams and coincidences. She probably thinks that Mrs. Livingston imagined her mother in the smoke, too.
“Did Mr. Wellington regret driving Jane away?” Harriet asks. “Did he regret hiring stri
kebreakers, making his fortune over the top of dead bodies?”
Her voice is still harsh and angry, judging Jane’s father. “When Mr. Wellington died,” Mrs. Livingston says, “he left most of his fortune to the suffrage movement.”
Harriet raises one eyebrow, in surprise.
“Was that enough?” she asks. “Did he earn his atonement?”
Mrs. Livingston frowns.
“Why are you asking me? I’m not a priest. I’m not a rabbi. Who am I to decide?”
Harriet toys with the fringe of the antimacassar on her chair.
“My father,” she says, “was defiant on the witness stand. He was acquitted of any responsibility for the Triangle fire because he could afford to hire Max Steuer, the best lawyer in the city. And Mr. Steuer tricked the shirtwaist girls on the witness stand into sounding like liars. My father and Uncle Isaac collected more than sixty thousand dollars in insurance money, even above the costs of the fire, money they didn’t have to share with anyone else. Two years later—” Her voice grows thick. She tries again. “Two years later my father was fined for once again locking his employees into his factory during the workday. He’s lucky there was not another fire.”
Mrs. Livingston feels a blast of fury sweep over her, as if, with Yetta gone, she has to experience the indignation on her friend’s behalf as well as her own. How could someone learn so little from his worst mistakes?
“He was fined only twenty dollars,” Harriet says. “And the judge apologized for fining him at all.”
She sounds so forlorn and sorrowful that Mrs. Livingston cannot hold on to her fury.
“The world,” she says dryly, “is not a perfect place even yet.”
“Bella,” Harriet says, and Mrs. Livingston recognizes the same pleading tone that Harriet had had in her voice as a five-year-old. “What should I do? When I come into my inheritance, should I give it up like Jane did? I—I’m not that brave or that good. I wouldn’t know how to survive being poor. But how can I keep taking money earned from . . . from evil?”
This, Mrs. Livingston realizes, is what Harriet has really comes to ask her. The details of leaping flames and screaming, terrified girls were only previews to what really matters: now. What can any of us do now?
Mrs. Livingston is tempted to repeat her earlier answer: I’m not a priest. I’m not a rabbi. Who am I to decide? She has only an eighth-grade diploma, earned at night school, not a college degree. She was illiterate until she was sixteen; she grew up in a one-room hut and slept with goats and chickens. She is, still, nobody.
But she has stared directly into the face of Mr. Blanck’s evil. Into the flames. She lost her two best friends, her comari, to his carelessness, to his devotion to the accumulation of money above all other goals, even the goal of keeping his own workers alive. Even now, she sometimes has nightmares where she has a thousand shirtwaists to sew, and Signor Carlotti is breathing down her neck, and then the shirtwaists are on fire and the sewing machine is made out of skeletons and Signor Carlotti’s face is burning, melting like a candle, and he’s still screaming, “Faster! Sew faster! There are a hundred girls coming into Ellis Island right now who’ll take your job if you can’t do it right! They’d be willing to die for this job—why aren’t you?”
Mrs. Livingston always wakes from those nightmares sobbing.
“Harriet,” she says in a ragged voice. “If you are asking me for forgiveness, or absolution—” She has forgotten that absolution is a Catholic concept, not a Jewish one.
“It would kill Papa if I spurned him,” Harriet says. “If I even told him that I disapprove of him . . . He’s always been such a wonderful father, so loving and kind. He’s always given us everything we ever wanted.”
Mrs. Livingston thinks of the landowners back in Italy who let the peasants die—their children probably thought they were wonderful too. But she keeps her mouth shut and waits for Harriet to go on.
“Anyhow,” Harriet says. “Nothing I can do could ever bring back Yetta and Jane.”
“That’s not true,” Mrs. Livingston argues. “How you live, how you spend your money, the ways you honor their memory—all of that can bring them back. Their spirit, anyway.”
“That’s not enough,” Harriet says.
It’s not. Sometimes Mrs. Livingston feels like Yetta, with her perpetual yearning. It’s not enough to have two lovely daughters, to have a handsome, loving husband, to have charitable work and new friends and in-laws. Nothing can ever be enough when Mrs. Livingston has such gaping holes in her heart. But Mrs. Livingston has learned to live with that.
She sighs.
“Jane did not plan on dying when she was only seventeen,” she says. “She was like a work-in-progress, still figuring out what she believed, what that meant about how she wanted to live her life. For what it’s worth, I think she would have forgiven her father eventually. Somehow.”
“And she would have gone to college,” Harriet says. “She would have become a famous teacher—she was really good at teaching, did you know that? And Yetta would have married Jacob; she would have become a famous union organizer. My father took all that away from both of them.”
“You can’t give it back,” Mrs. Livingston says. “But there are other girls out there now, girls who are hungry and confused, eager and hopeful, but nobody’s giving them a chance. . . .”
“So you’re saying if I take my father’s money, I have to be a do-gooder instead of a flapper?” Harriet asks. “Help others instead of just having fun?”
“You asked me,” Mrs. Livingston says.
Harriet sits there. Mrs. Livingston knows what others would see: a pretty girl with bobbed hair and a fringed dress. A surface kind of person, someone who’s been groomed her whole life to look good entering a party on the arm of a wealthy man. But Mrs. Livingston sees a soul in turmoil, a young girl looking for the right answers, not just the easy ones.
“Mama?” It is little Yetta, standing at the top of the stairs. “I woke up and you didn’t come and get me.”
She pushes tangled curls out of her eyes and stares accusingly down at her mother.
“That’s because I didn’t know you were awake,” Mrs. Livingston says lightly. She pats the space beside her on the couch. “Come down here, Yetta, there’s someone I’d like you to meet. A—a friend of mine.”
Harriet stiffens at the word “friend,” as if she understands what Mrs. Livingston is offering, what she is asking. This is like lions lying down with lambs, like swords being hammered into plowshares, like fires of bitterness and sorrow and grief finally being extinguished.
“I’m not really your mother’s friend,” Harriet says. “Not yet. But I would like to be.”
She looks over at Mrs. Livingston hopefully. This is why money is not God in America, Mrs. Livingston thinks. This is why, when they said on the boat, ‘Anythingis possible in America,’ they were not just talking about striking it rich. This is how I finally escape the fire, by becoming friends with Harriet Blanck, who is trying to escape too.
Mrs. Livingston spreads her arms, and her daughter, little Yetta, races down the stairs and throws herself into her mother’s embrace, so trustingly. She’ll never know, Mrs. Livingston thinks. But no—she will someday. Someday Mrs. Livingston will tell her daughter the story of the Triangle fire, and she dares to hope that by then it will be hard for her daughter to believe, hard for her to even imagine a time when life meant so little, when tragedy came so easily, when the whole world needed to wake up. She dares to hope that she and her daughters and Harriet Blanck can play a role in moving the world further and further away from that time.
Mrs. Livingston hugs little Yetta close and whispers into her daughter’s hair, “We will not be stupid girls. We will not be powerless girls. We will not be useless girls.” And, for just a moment, she believes she can hear two other voices whispering along with her.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The shirtwaist strike of 1909-10 really happened.
The Triangle Shirt
waist Factory fire of March 25, 1911, really happened.
Personally, when I’ve just read a historical novel that seemed completely real to me—as I hope this book seemed completely real to you—I hate to then read an author’s note explaining, “Well, this was real, but this wasn’t; this event didn’t actually occur, but it could have; this character I completely made up.” Because then the story recedes back into distant history, and what seemed so alive and immediate and tangible is gone. So I won’t tell you which parts of this book didn’t really happen. Suffice it to say that I tried to stick to the historical facts as much as possible, unless I felt I had a really, really good reason not to. And if you feel you must distill the history from the fiction, then you are welcome to do research of your own. I’ll even suggest ways to do that. (More about that later.)
If you just want to know more about the early 1900s and the strike and the fire and what they meant to history, read on.
In many ways, the early 1900s were not such a different time period from our own. Americans then were fascinated with the latest technology—although their “new” technology was airplanes and automobiles and up-to-date sewing machines, not computers and iPods and video cell phones. There were stunning disparities between the rich and the poor, and reformers were calling out for change. And, at a time when huge numbers of foreigners were pouring into the United States looking for economic opportunity or religious freedom—or just a better chance of staying alive—Americans had mixed feelings about welcoming these newcomers.
For many Italians and Russian Jews, even a half-hearted welcome was far better than what they faced in their homelands. In southern Italy, peasants were starving. Without land of their own, with economic and governmental and agricultural systems that seemed to guarantee their starvation, many of them felt they had no choice but to leave for America or Argentina or some other country—anywhere they might have a chance. In most cases, the Italian immigrants intended to return home as soon as they’d saved up enough money. That often didn’t go as planned. A common witticism was that Italians came to America expecting to see streets paved with gold—but when they got here, they discovered that not only were the streets not paved with gold, they weren’t paved at all. And furthermore, the Italians were expected to do the paving!